SAY what you like about him, you can always rely on Jim Murphy to give good nonsense.

The Scottish Labour leader was at it again yesterday on a visit to an Edinburgh youth cafe.

"I'm enjoying this," he said of an increasingly bleak general election for his party.

"I don't feel under pressure - I'm not a personal pressure type of guy."

It was a brave if quite unconvincing attempt to look positive at the end of a dreadful week.

For if Murphy was in any doubt about the state of Scottish Labour before he took the helm two months ago, he can be under no illusions now.

The series of polls published by Lord Ashcroft on Wednesday laid it out for him in 50 foot neon: Scottish Labour is in crisis.

Tens of thousands of Labour supporters who broke with the party to vote Yes in the referendum have not gone back, despite the change of leader, but have switched to the SNP.

If the SNP maintains the 20-point lead seen in the Ashcroft polls, almost all of Scotland's Labour MPs will lose their seats on May 7, and Ed Miliband will be out of a job soon after.

As even Sunny Jim concedes, the Ashcroft polls are "really very bad" for Scottish Labour.

The pressure on Murphy now is enormous.

Labour's election hopes rest on his shoulders.

And if he fails to turn around the polls, the party's blame will surely come down on him too.

To be fair, the crisis is not Murphy's fault, though he has been a mute witness to it.

The failure to foresee the impact of devolution, the disdain for Holyrood, the second-rate MSPs, the weak leaders, the lack of ideas, the over reliance on simply not being the Tories - Scottish Labour's mistakes are long and legion.

Nor is Ed Miliband Murphy's doing - he famously ran David Miliband's leadership campaign.

But Murphy has not been helping himself either.

To underline the "new management", he has pumped out fleeting statements on health, education, patriotism, railways, new powers and more.

But what stuck? Who remembers it?

By trying too hard to appear energetic, Murphy has more often looked frantic and unfocused.

Rather than a manifesto in the making, his froth of ideas seems as weightless as confetti.

The attempt to kidnap the word Yes, which we reveal today, has the same fevered air to it.

Perhaps it is the pressure he says he is immune to, or just more Scottish Labour incompetence.

If a fundamental realignment is taking place deep in Scottish politics, Murphy won't stop it.

But if changes tack for the election he could at least emerge with a little dignity.